Public financing of stadiums and tax money spending

This post is being made based on Bill Simmons' recent article about Seattle losing the Supersonics. Normally, I don't read his stuff cause I'm not a big Boston sports fan, but I find it utterly ridiculous that owners of sports franchises demand the city pay for new stadiums or else. I mean, the current trend in the United States is to let schools, roads, electrical grid, parks and everything else completely go to shit while a city will drop 300 million for a stadium to promote economic development. I'm assuming they mean economic development for some already ridiculously wealthy white guy. I had suspicion that no economic development really occurs when an existing stadium that is already bringing in money is replaced with a modern facility. So I did what all good grad students do and I went to journal articles. I found this. I'll summarize some of the finer points in this post. Essentially, the data (which has several flaws that the author discusses, but has some strengths also) states that no metropolitan area really benefited in terms of per capita income growth by having a new stadium, and actually, three cities had negative impacts. The shocking thing to me was that having a professional sports team didn't help growth either in most cases. So the findings from the study are that its not a sound civic investment to invest in stadiums. I'm not going to explain anymore of the article, but its worth the read, it is interesting.

Don't get me wrong, I love watching sports, I love going to sports, I love playing sports, but why is our tax money going towards stadiums that are used in a for profit company? The idea of giving tax breaks to companies is that your city will benefit if they move a plant there by gaining jobs, hence economic growth. Maytag pulled some bs in Newton, IA where they essentially asked for so much tax money, the return of them being there wasn't worth it, so Iowa told them to go fist themselves. They gave small tax breaks to a few companies that are producing wind turbines, to move into the old Maytag plant, now Newton is gaining some of their jobs back.

I can understand building venues in places like Des Moines, where they have multiple semi-pro teams using the arena, host high school state tournaments, have concerts, and whatever else you can think of. Speaking of the Iowa Events Center, good for them for not using Ticketmaster. I'll explain my dislike of them later. I digress, sorry. I can also understand if the city chunks in some money cause it is a large investment. But I don't feel that tax payers should have to pay for something that a person is going to use to make exuberant amounts of money off of.

So in an era when public money is slim we buy stadiums. Good for us, we like luxury items more than things that actually encourage economic growth. It's messed up, and thats why the Seattle Supersonics moving makes me so angry. Them leaving because the city of Seattle wouldn't pay half a billion dollars for a new stadium is going to put other cities in the same situation. Do we vote it down cause we can't really afford it, risk losing our team to some crappy town like Oklahoma City, or do we just pass a tax increase and pay for the damn thing? Then theres the Yankees. They're paying 1.1 billion for their own stadium. The MN Twins are $140 million out of $450 million, the county is paying the rest. I guess we'll see what the Vikings do. Detroit did it right with Comerica, they added a rental car and hotel tax to pay their 40%. I could research this forever, but I think the point is, cities shouldn't pay for stadiums specifically designed for one sport team only.